170 MATTER FOR REFLECTION. 



year's ice-belt which had been caught by the winter, 

 each one laden with its heavy freight of foreign 

 material. 



" The water torrents and thaws of summer unite 

 with the tides in disengaging the ice-belt from the 

 coast ; but it is not uncommon for large bergs to 

 drive against it and carry away the growths of many 

 years. JE have found masses that had been detached 

 in this way, floating many miles out at sea long, 

 symmetrical tables, two hundred feet long by eighty 

 broad, covered with large angular rocks and boulders, 

 and seemingly impregnated throughout with detrited 

 matter. These rafts in Marshall Bay were so 

 numerous, that could they have melted as I saw 

 them, the bottom of the sea would have presented a 

 more curious study for the geologist than the boulder- 

 covered lines of our middle latitudes. One boulder 

 in particular had had its origin in a valley where 

 rounded fragments of water-washed greenstone had 

 been poured out by the torrents and frozen into the 

 coast-ice of the belt. The attrition of subsequent 

 matter had truncated the great egg-shaped rock, 

 and worn its sides into a striated face, whose 

 scratches still indicated the line of water-flow." 



So, then, when we next meet with a huge isolated 

 boulder on any of our flat beaches, we may gaze at 

 it with additional interest, when we reflect that, per- 

 chance, it was carried thither by the ocean, count- 

 less ages ago, from the arctic regions, on a gigantic 

 raft of ice; after having been, at a still more remote 



